3 Things Great Managers Do to Inspire their Teams

3 Things Great Managers Do to Inspire their Teams

Want a more inspired and engaged team but not sure where to start?

Here are three high-impact leadership practices you can implement with your team. This article tells you exactly how to do these and why they work.

Practice # 1. Rally the team around an inspiring and shared purpose.

Why this works: People want to do important work and feel they are contributing to something worthwhile. They also want to be a part of a group that is doing cool things and provide input into their collective purpose.

When managers get this right, it can be a powerful source of inspiration and motivation and enable their teams to push through challenges, collaborate, and innovate in exciting new ways.

How to do it: Organize and facilitate a team workshop where the team creates an inspiring statement of purpose. Sometimes called the Team Mission, a purpose statement answers three key questions:

1.?????Who do we serve?

2.?????What do we do for them?

3.?????Why does our work matter?

Additional tips for a successful workshop:

·???????Plan for two hours; all at once or broken into two, one-hour sessions.

·???????This can be done in person or virtually; I don’t recommend hybrid. If anyone will be virtual then everyone should be virtual to create a level playing field.

·???????Give your team a few day’s heads-up on what you are planning so they can come prepared with some thoughts. Honor the different thinking styles on your team.

·???????Ground your team purpose in the mission and strategy of your organization; make sure your team understands and buys into these things before you develop your team purpose statement. You want your purpose to be personally meaningful to the team AND impactful to the broader organization. Not only is that your job, connecting team purpose to larger organizational priorities increases its motivational power and the visibility and value of your team.

·???????Stay in the facilitator’s role as much as possible. If someone offers an idea you were thinking, avoid the temptation to say, “I was thinking the same thing” or “Great idea!”. You want to avoid saying anything ‘evaluative’ as that can have a chilling effect on your team’s brainstorming. If you say “great” to one idea and not others, what message does that inadvertently send?

·???????If your team offers an idea you don’t like, keep your thoughts (and facial expressions!) to yourself and let it play out. I’ve found that most of the time others will feel the same as you and take care of it. If not, you can express your thoughts when you come to the voting step. As the team leader, you always have veto power if something truly harmful is working its way into the mix. If you do pull the veto card, explain what you are worried about, and work with the team to come up with a solution everyone feels good about. It needs to be a shared purpose.

·???????Make sure everyone contributes; you may need to call on people by name. Keep it simple: “Pat, what are your thoughts?”

·???????Keep working the statement until you have 100% support. I like using the three-finger voting method: 3 = I support it, 2 = I am willing to live with it, and 1 = I’m not on board. If everyone is a 3 you are good to go! If anyone is a 1 or 2, ask them what changes would be necessary for them to be a 3. A “2” is not an acceptable outcome here. Facilitate additional dialogue, make revisions, and vote again. Keep going until everyone is a 3. Take a break if you’re getting bogged down and come back to it in a few days.

·???????Once you’ve created the purpose statement, ask if anyone on the team would like to create a visual to share or display. You may have some hidden talents on the team you can tap into!

·???????Once per quarter, take your team through these three questions: 1) “Is our purpose still right? 2) In what ways are we honoring our purpose? 3) How could we honor our purpose more fully?” Use your team’s answers to these questions to adjust the statement and/or team operations.

Some final encouragement:

·???????You may be worried you don’t have time to do this. If your team doesn’t have a clear and compelling purpose now, trust me when I say that you can’t afford to NOT do this. Your purpose is the foundation for everything your team does, how you determine individual assignments, and how you will demonstrate the ongoing value of your team and your leadership.

·???????It only takes 2 hours! That’s only 5% of the time for one week, 1% of the time for one month, and .004 of the time for your next quarter. The benefits you and your team will gain from this will last long into the future and pay off big time.

·???????If your next few weeks are already full, simply go out a few weeks and secure the two-hour workshop time now. The rest of your teams’ activities and the inevitable whirlwind will simply fit around it.

If you still have questions about how to plan or facilitate a successful team purpose workshop, please message me and I’d be happy to help you out. You can also email me directly [email protected].

Practice #2.?Define clear expectations and outcomes for every team member.

Why this works: Engagement and performance increase when people have clearly defined goals and ways to measure their progress. Decades of research show that goals are most effective and more inspirational when:

·???????The employee creates the goal or provides significant input.

·???????The goal(s) present a worthwhile challenge and feels achievable.

·???????The goal is defined in terms of outcomes as this empowers the employee to achieve the goal in their own preferred way.

How to do it:

·???????Meet with each member of your team to review their area(s) of responsibility and develop inspiring, employee driven goals.

·???????Begin by confirming your shared understanding of the scope of their responsibility. Allow them to go first and outline what they are responsible for. If needed, add or adjust the list and confirm your shared understanding of the overall scope.

·???????Next, invite your team member to develop clearly defined, measurable, and time-specific outcomes that they commit to deliver within their area of responsibility.

·???????An ideal number is 3 – 5 clearly defined outcomes, but in some cases it may be appropriate to go a little higher. Just make sure the total workload and commitment is realistic and achievable.

·???????Notice the focus here is on “outcomes”, meaning the specific end-product or result they will be responsible for. We want to focus on outcomes as much as possible because it provides a concrete target for your employee’s efforts that this strengthens focus and goal achievement. It also empowers your team members to achieve their outcomes in their own, strength-based way which feels great and boosts motivation.

·???????Ask your employee to also define how the success of each outcome will be determined. Some quick terminology here: each outcome should have a “measure” and a “target”. The measure is what aspect of the performance or outcome will be evaluated to determine success. For example, in a health-related goal, the measure could be “pounds lost”. The “target” would be the specific number of pounds we want to lose (e.g. 5 pounds).

·???????Having concrete, measurable outcomes empowers your employee to monitor their own performance and course correct where needed. Having measurable outcomes also makes it easier to evaluate success, recognize your employees, or identify when additional training, coaching, or other support actions may be needed.

·???????Also ask your employee to propose the schedule for when their different outcomes will be delivered.

·???????As noted above, a best practice to increase employee engagement is to let your employee put together the first draft of their outcomes, measures, and timelines. You may be worried that your employees will play it safe and not push hard enough, but I’ve found the opposite to be more likely.

·???????After your employee creates their proposal, review it with them to test for overall alignment to their area of responsibility and reasonableness. Here are some questions to run through together, and to inform any adjustments in the final plan:

·???????Are they focusing on the right priorities?

·???????Are these outcomes meaningful and inspiring?

·???????Are they taking on too much?

·???????Are the measures and targets well defined?

·???????Is the timeline reasonable?

·???????Will the schedule meet our team strategy or commitments to others?

·???????What do they need from you or others to be successful?

·???????How often should you meet to review progress against these goals?

·???????Once you’ve completed this process with each of your employees, hold a team meeting where each team member shares their goals with their team-mates. This will enable your team to support one another and creates a more unified team feeling. It also sets the stage nicely for periodic team reviews where people report out on their progress and successes and cheer each other on.

If you have questions about how to set inspiring expectations for your team, please message me and I’d be happy to help you out. You can also email me directly at [email protected].

Practice #3.?????Celebrate the team’ collective success AND lessons learned.

Why this works:

·???????People want to be on a winning team, and for their hard work and talents to be recognized. This payoff increases motivation to keep going and make future contributions. What gets recognized gets repeated.

·???????It’s also important to create a safe space for experimentation and learning from things that don’t go as planned. Psychologists call this “psychological safety”, and research shows it increases trust, collaboration, creativity, and innovation.

How to do it:

Hold regular team meetings where a standing agenda item is devoted to reviewing recent successes of the team. You do hold regular team meetings, right? If not, schedule 45-60 minutes every week (every other week at the most). Use this time to share information with the team, celebrate birthdays and other milestones, and celebrate recent successes and lessons learned.

Additional tips:

·???????Everyone on the team may not have a success to share every week, and I think that is ok. But everyone should be sharing at least 1-2 times per month.

·???????Ask for volunteers to begin. If they don’t tie their success back to your broader team purpose or organizational goals, gently add that to the discussion. Ask, “in what ways is this connected to our team purpose (or mission) or the broader organizational goals?”

·???????Once all the volunteers have self-reported, ask if anyone wants to recognize someone else’s success on the team. As before, help connect the dots between individual achievement and team and organizational objectives.

·???????Finally, end with any other successes you are aware of and which haven’t been mentioned yet. Be prepared with a few kudos to share out. You don’t need to recognize everyone every time. Be proactive to solicit positive feedback and kudos from key customers, other teams, and your manager; this way you will have more positives to share and celebrate in your team meetings.

·???????Don’t forget the lesson’s learned! Include a standing agenda item to celebrate bold experiments and other efforts that didn’t turn out quite as well. This is how you foster and nurture psychological safety.

·???????Go first yourself and come prepared to share something you did that wasn’t perfect (or that was a hot mess) and what you learned from it. This role modeling is essential as you are first starting this practice with your team. You may not need to lead off every time, and it’s great to let others go first if they want to share.

·???????After you share your example, invite others to share their own experiences. Unlike the successes above, I don’t recommend peer recognition here. Although we wish everyone was comfortable with learning from their failures, it can be too sensitive for some, and it’s best if we don’t invite team-members to point out one another’s misses unless you have an extremely advanced culture of growth mindset and psychological safety (if you do, please contact me as I’d love to learn how you cultivated that).

·???????Reinforce the learning mindset and focus less on what went wrong (backward looking) and more on what we can learn for the next time and/or do different (forward looking). There’s nothing that can be done to change the past, and it is more hopeful and encouraging to bring a future focus to the discussion. A good question prompt here is “What can we learn from this for the next time?”.

·???????Publicly thank the people involved for their courage, creativity, etc. and for allowing the team to benefit from their experience.

·???????Ask the team to come up with a non-threatening name for this part of the agenda. I once had a team that chose the lighthearted name “Fantastic Flops” and another that preferred the more neutral term “Stepping Stones.”

If you have questions about how to do any of this, please message me and I’d be happy to help you out. You can also email me directly at [email protected].

Best wishes to you and your team for greater inspiration and engagement ahead!

Cheering you on,

Dr. Steve, Founder and Principal

Blueroot Leadership Development